I'm Andy Warren, currently a SQL Server trainer with End to End Training. Over the past few years I've been a developer, DBA, and IT Director. I was one of the original founders of SQLServerCentral.com and helped grow that community from zero to about 300k members before deciding to move on to other ventures.

Archives: January 2009

The fifth annual South Florida Code Camp is being held on Feb 7th. They've got a huge schedule of sessions, probably the biggest you'll see at a free event. This will be my second year participating, I'll be giving a short presentation on SQL statistics and spending the rest of… Read more

Forgot I had this, a friend had sent it to a while back as something I might blog about. Mike Elgan discusses work ethic versus attention control (aka focus). If you read yesterday, you might find this worthwhile - Work Ethic 2.0: Attention Control. Read more

It's been busy since my last update, lots of stuff to work on! I probably won't get it all in one post, but I'll try to hit the highlights. The main event over the past two weeks was my first board meeting in Seattle.

If you could list all the reasons I work, the number one reason would be to support my family. My definition of support includes spending an appropriate amount of time with family, not just working to support it. I suspect most of you would agree with that as a goal.… Read more

SQLSaturday #10 was held January 24, 2008 in Tampa at the Kforce Building. Attendance was about 175, down slightly from the year before. Overall the event turned out well; 36 sessions, everyone got fed, no major logistical challenges. I definitely noticed a few repeat participants from last year, and we've… Read more

Another story from a previous job. I joined the company in August, in October they started prepping for Halloween - it was a really big deal at that time (1998) and each department fought hard to be the winner of the overall decorating contest. I reluctantly joined the planning team… Read more

We had our first oPASS meeting of the year last week with about 18 attending. Jonathan Kehayias was our featured speaker, doing a a nice presentation on common performance issues. Always a topic of interest, and we had lots of good questions during the presentation. I also spent about half… Read more

Continuing the conversation I began in Part 1 & Part 2, today I want to ruminate some more on networking. I've had a good discussions about networking since I wrote the first two parts, with a focus on the value of networking. Quite a few people had stories about… Read more

A while back I mentioned that Radio Shack had an interesting promotion on a netbook and debated at what price I'd find such a device buyable, and I also recently mentioned seeing the Alphasmart Neo. My friend Diego dropped me a note that a cheaper alternative to the Neo is… Read more

We all have those things that happen at work that somehow turn into something other than expected, and sometimes in quite humorous fashion. I've got a few to share over the next couple months, but had to start with this one!

Apress sent me a free review copy, so I took a quick look through it at lunch. I've used full text a few times and know the basics, but I'm far from being a power user. The first chapter seemed kind of dense, more about the internal process than I… Read more

It's been about two weeks since I posted PASS Update #1, so time for another update on my activities as a member of the PASS Board of Directors. It's been a quiet but interesting couple weeks. The first thing I worked on was an early draft of what I… Read more

One of my goals for the year is to update my blog roll some and try to recognize new/interesting bloggers. Part of that is just good karma, part is that discovery still remains the hard part - how do you/I know what we're missing?

I'm a technology guy, but one lesson I've learned is that not all solutions can be solved by throwing technology at it. For example, try classifying a first name as male or female. Quite a few are pretty clear, but there are enough that aren't to make it something that… Read more

I decided to attend to see how the group was doing and learn a little more about Dot Net Nuke (DNN). Meetings are held on the other side of Orlando from me, but with a 7 pm start time I missed most of the traffic and had an easy drive.… Read more

I've been meaning to do this for a year, finally caught up with Eric Johnson of Consortio Services to do a podcast. We did about 15 minutes discussing community events, sites, and user groups (please do listen if you want the whole scoop). It was fun, but challenging -… Read more

I ran across the AlphaSmart Neo in The Writer magazine. It's a $219 "laptop" that is for writing only, basically a word processor, and supposed to give 700 hours on 3 AA batteries. The lack of features and battery life are the selling points - no distractions! Seems expensive for… Read more